


missing scenes from 'born of the ice'

by anirondack



Series: trans victor verse [2]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: (No Adolescents Have Sex), Adolescent Sexuality, Character Study, Chris is a good friend, Dancing, Dysphoria, Gen, M/M, No Malicious Transphobia, Other, Pre-Canon, Sharing a Bed, Skates, Skating, Some (Unknowing) Misgendering, Trans Character, Trans Gay Victor Nikiforov, Trans Male Character, Trans Victor Nikiforov, gay clubs, implied past sexual content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-31
Updated: 2017-04-21
Packaged: 2018-10-13 08:39:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10510218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anirondack/pseuds/anirondack
Summary: missing scenes and extra content from the ficborn of the ice, a character study about transmasculine Victor Nikiforov.this is marked as complete because it's supplemental content and not a continuing narrative, but i'll be adding more scenes as i write them, so there will be more chapters after this.tags updated per chapter.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> takes place in the late summer after Victor heals from his broken rib in 2003. [see the timeline here if you want to check that out](https://www.docdroid.net/F3jXI0k/transvictortimeline.pdf.html).
> 
> i have a bunch of scenes like this to get through, so subscribe to this fic or bookmark it if you want to get updated when i add new ones!

Victor is fifteen and in Juniors.

There are other boys here who are fifteen and in Juniors, and sixteen and in Juniors, and even a couple who are seventeen and in Juniors.

Some of them are beautiful.

Victor can’t stand it.

He never used to look this much, but now it feels like he can’t stop sometimes. He trains with the other Junior girls and he watches Junior boys out of the corner of his eye as the other girls practice spins. They look at him sometimes too, but he never lets them catch him watching.

Yakov has three Junior boys who look promising. He has others who don’t, but Victor only has eyes for the ones who work hard and push sweat-damp hair off of their foreheads and tilt their chins up to drink water at the side of the rink. His eyes slide down their throats and then back down to the ice before anyone can notice. He notices when they skate past him during warmups. Sometimes, he catches their eye, and there are a lot of things in play when he does. Respect is a big one, and jealousy, from both parties.

Boys are jealous of Victor because he is brilliant. He is far and away Yakov’s best Junior skater of any gender, and the Junior boys are mildly and quietly resentful of this. Victor can do everything they can do, better, with more flair and fewer falls. They’re always catching up to him, trailing after who they think is a fifteen year old girl.

Victor is jealous of boys because they are called boys, and if they like boys, boys who like boys will like them back.

Victor leans against the barrier and talks to another fifteen year old Junior. His name is Nikita. He is very pretty. He is talented, though not as talented as Victor. They talk about the scoring for axel jumps and Victor thinks that, somewhere in there, something called flirting happens.

“Your axel is so clean, Vika,” Nikita says. His eyes are bright with the two usual emotions, and maybe a third around the edges.

“Stick around after practice and I’ll help you work on your triple,” Victor says.

Nikita’s eyes widen a little, and then he nods. Victor doesn’t know how to teach, but his triple axel _is_ very clean, so it can’t be too hard to show someone else.

After practice, most of the Juniors go to the locker rooms to shower and change. A few Senior skaters are working on some choreographic steps, but they mostly stick to their own area of the rink, and Victor and Nikita get a little corner to themselves.

Victor does his triple axel over and over. Nikita leans against the barrier and watches intently, his eyes tracking the movement of Victor’s body. Every time Victor comes out of his exit, he skates back and points out another thing he remembered you have to do in a triple axel, and then he winds up and jumps again. He makes Nikita do his triple axel, which is wobbly and under-rotated, and then they take turns doing it until Nikita drops his arms onto the barrier, panting.

Victor grabs his water bottle from the edge of the barrier and takes a long gulp. Then he holds it out to Nikita and Nikita takes it gratefully. Victor watches his throat as he drinks.

“I still can’t get it the last half rotation just right,” he says unhappily.

“It’s better, at least,” Victor offers. It _is_ better than it was before, though not by much.

“Can we practice again later this week?” Nikita asks. “You’re really great at them.”

Victor finds himself going a little pink, and the extra blood in his head makes him nod. “Yeah. Sure.”

Nikita gives him a tired grin. “Thanks, Vika.”

Nikita slides off the ice and pulls his skates off and goes to the locker rooms and goes home. Victor stays on the ice for a little while longer, just doing some old, old figures, until Tatiana skates past.

“Vikusha, do you have a boyfriend now?” she teases.

“What? No.” Victor says, probably too quickly and to defensively for what is actually the truth.

Tatiana’s smile widens a little. “If you say so.” Victor makes a face at her back and tries not to think about Nikita until he goes to drink from his water bottle again and remembers that Nikita’s lips touched it and feels warm all over again.

They practice together a few more times. Victor doesn’t really know how to explain anything other than to do it over and over, so he does so many triple axels it’s like when he was first learning to do them with his old coach from Nevsky. Nikita improves a little, but not a lot - Yakov could teach him better, but no one has seen Yakov do a triple axel in many years. It shouldn’t be enough to keep Victor’s attention, because he rarely has the patience for things that don’t work, but he keeps hanging back at the rink every other night and watching Nikita’s body spin through the air and then land hard on the ice.

It’s stupid. He knows what he’s doing and he wishes he wasn’t doing it. Nikita calls him Vika and looks at him with eyes that are warm sometimes and hot other times. Victor is positive that his own face does the same without his permission. He watches Nikita’s torso move under his training shirt and wants to press his his palms along Nikita’s sides and feel the solidity of his body. He wants to scrape his lips on the tiniest bit of stubble that Nikita has to shave away.

Nikita doesn’t want that. Victor knows, because he can see it in Nikita’s eyes when their gazes meet and hang on for just a second too long. Nikita sees Victor’s hips and his long hair and his lips and his breasts, even though they’re crushed under a sports bra and then hidden by a baggy training top, and he wants _that_. He wants Victoriya Nikiforova, who is stunningly beautiful and stunningly talented and stunningly female, and Victor almost doesn’t blame him. If he were straight, if he wanted to press his palms against the sides of girls and brush his lips against their jaws, he could see the appeal of himself. He’s slender and strong and pretty and all the other things girls are supposed to be and Nikita wants those things and Victor realizes over time how much he hates that.

“Vika, are you okay?” Nikita asks. Victor has just stumbled out of a triple axel. Victor almost never stumbles on his triple axel.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. I just got too far outside.” Victor shakes out one leg, then the other, then skates to get his water before he remembers with a horrible sinking feeling that Nikita let him use his.

“I thought it looked okay until the end,” Nikita says.

 _And that’s why you’re not going to advance to Seniors_ , Victor thinks quietly in his head. He’d let himself be fooled into thinking Nikita was one of Yakov’s best. He’s normally so much more objective than that.

“It was poorly executed. I’ll do better next time.”

“It was really good,” Nikita insists. “Triple axels are so pretty when you do them.”

Nikita is not really talking about triple axels.

Victor pauses, water bottle halfway between his mouth and the barrier wall. He blinks at Nikita. Nikita’s eyes are hot. He looks only at Victor’s face, but Victor can feel Nikita’s mind drifting downwards. He’s thinking of Victor’s body as it spins through the air. No, he’s thinking of _Victoriya’s_ body as it spins through the air. He’s thinking of Victoriya’s body when it lands on the ice and carries on and skates up to him with a hair toss and a smile.

Victor turns away. He doesn’t mean to, but he does, making a scraping noise on the ice. He sets the water bottle on the barrier wall. “Let me do it again,” he says, and the words could be read as flirty but his tone is flat. Before Nikita can say anything, Victor skates away, and he winds up, and he does his triple axel and nearly over-rotates with how hard he pushes.

A triple axel is not beautiful to one who does it. A triple axel is anxiety and a high base score and a lead-in that’s opposite of everything else you know, forwards instead of backwards. A triple axel is the barrier that Victor is held to, even though Miki did a quad, because Yakov doesn’t let Juniors do quads and so Victor can never compete with one. Nikita isn’t allowed to do quads either, but he can’t even do a triple axel. He’s not good enough. He can’t do what Victor does.

Nikita doesn’t think Victor’s triple axel is pretty because it’s a triple axel. He thinks Victor’s triple axel is pretty because he’s Victoriya.

Victor feels himself getting angry. He’s not sure why. He rarely gets angry at anything, let alone another person. He knows Nikita is watching him, and he is angry about it. He wants to push Nikita in the chest and force him to look away. Victor doesn’t consider himself a masochist; he’s not sure why he let this go on so long.

“That was amazing, Vika,” Nikita says when Victor skates back. He looks kind of nervous.

“Thanks,” Victor says without emotion. “I don’t think I can teach you anything else.”

“Oh.”

“You’ll get better practice if you work with Yakov on it.”

“I guess. You’re probably right.”

“I am right.”

Nikita rubs the back of his head and looks at the ice. There’s a very uncomfortable couple of seconds of silence between them.

“Look, I’m sorry if I–”

“You didn’t,” Victor says. “It’s fine.”

“Are you sure? I didn’t mean–”

“It’s fine,” Victor repeats, more firmly. Nikita’s gaze is not on his face, or his body, or Victoriya’s body. It is firmly locked on the ice between them.

“Okay,” Nikita says after a moment.

“Good.” Victor turns on his blade and skates away. He doesn’t even wipe the ice off his blades before he puts his guards on, and then goes straight to the women’s locker room and straight to the showers. He strips his clothes off and piles them over his skates to keep them as dry as possible and then stands in the shower as it pours water over him. He looks down at himself, at his breasts and his hips and the little bit of softness under his belly that all the girls have. He touches himself, one hand sliding down his hip and the other resting on his ribs, feeling himself breathe. Looking is like digging into a wound, agonizing and somehow satisfying. Victor does not like what he sees, and he doesn’t like that Nikita likes what he sees either.

Nikita is still skating ten minutes later when Victor emerges from the locker room in his street clothes. He winds up and skates forward, but only does a double axel. He lifts his head and Victor turns away before they can make eye contact. There’s a pause in the scrape of skates against ice where Victor knows that Nikita has seen him too, and then the skates move again, back into pattern. Victor lets out a slow breath and turns and walks out of Yubileyny.

He was fourteen when he first kissed a boy, back at Nevsky, sitting behind the barrier walls and giggling. That was nothing like this. That was a little girl that Victor gave up pretending to be, a little girl who didn’t know that she was neither. A little girl who knew that the boy she kissed wanted to kiss her. A little girl who didn’t have to shoulder those kinds of doubts.

He wonders what Nikita would say, if he knew who Victor really was. He wonders what anyone would say.

He doesn’t look at Nikita again. It’s for the best.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i feel like this is a common feeling for some queer trans people, where the people they are attracted to are attracted to their assigned gender and not their real one. victor, as a gay trans boy, would probably have a lot of trouble with this, especially during his sexual awakening as a teenager.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Victor gets new skates for the first time since joining the Senior division. 
> 
> Takes place sometime after Victor gets Makkachin in the summer of 2006 (see the timeline [here](https://www.docdroid.net/F3jXI0k/transvictortimeline.pdf.html)).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> these skates are a metaphor

Victor has been in the Senior division for about a year and a half when his blade wobbles.

It catches him by surprise and he falls down nearly immediately. He wasn’t doing anything complicated - or anything at all, really, he was just lazily skating backwards - and everyone turns and looks at him as he sprawls on his ass. Victor looks down at his feet, confused, and then when he gets up again, he really feels it.

He skates off immediately and drops onto one of the benches. Usually he would put his blade guards on, but he’s pretty sure it’s not going to matter anymore. He unlaces his right boot and holds it up, peering at it. He wiggles the blade and, sure enough, the mount wobbles with it. He turns it to the side and wiggles it again and he can see the screw move too.

Victor frowns.

He thinks about to the last time he bought new boots. When he was younger, he went through boots as fast as one pair a year when his feet were still growing, but it’s been nearly two and a half years since he’s had to go in for replacements. The white leather is pretty scuffed up too, but he almost never sees that in competition because his designers give him boot covers so he doesn’t stand out too badly. The covers help protect the sides, but there isn’t much Victor can do to stop the bottoms from rotting out with how often he uses them.

He trades his other skate out for socked feet and walks to the locker room and puts his shoes on. He packs his skates into his duffel bag and trades his sweater for a warmer jacket and heads out to the rink. Yakov is leaning against the barrier, talking quietly with a Junior as he points to things on a sheet of paper, but he looks up when Victor approaches.

“Vitya. Why aren’t you practicing?”

“My heel mount is broken,” Victor says. “It came loose and the screw hole is warped.”

Yakov glances down at Victor’s feet, like he’d still be wearing broken skates, and sighs. “When’s the last time you got new skates?”

“A couple years ago?”

“You’re definitely due, then. I’m surprised they’ve lasted you this long.” Yakov uncaps his pen and scribbles something on the Junior boy’s technical component sheet. “Try this combination instead,” he mutters. The Junior boy nods and skates off and Yakov turns back to Victor. “Who made your last pair of skates?”

Victor thinks back to the summer before his last Junior event. “Harlick, I think.”

Yakov shakes his head. “Those are like bricks, Vitya. We can get you better ones. Check the listings in the back office, we keep the numbers for boot and blade sponsors on hand. Call them.”

“I will.”

“Obviously you can’t skate until you get new ones,” Yakov says. “So double gym training every day until your new blades are mounted and sharpened.”

“Yakov,” Victor whines.

“Fine, fine, break your ankle. It’s not like you have your Grand Prix assignments already.” Yakov nudges Victor’s shoulder with his elbow. Victor pretends to be grievously wounded.

“I’ll go look at the list, I promise.”

“Good. And eight in the morning tomorrow.” Yakov gives Victor a stern look, then turns and skates over to the corner of the rink where the Junior boy is practicing double combinations. He watches Yakov adjust the boy's positioning for a while, then heads to the office.

Next to the pinned lists of Grand Prix assignments and FFKK identification numbers and Nationals qualifier dates is the official list of on call equipment manufacturers and emergency repair phone numbers. Victor grabs a flier for beginner skating lessons and turns it over and scribbles down the top listed manufacturers, then folds the paper up and stuffs it into his pocket and jogs home.

That afternoon, he calls the Russian branch of Reidell and gives them his sizes and dimensions and heel preferences and, the next day, when he shows up for double gym training, there’s a representative there with a big case and a small case and a bright grin.

“Victor Nikiforov!” the representative says in a cheerful, booming voice. He holds out his hand and Victor shakes it. “Alexei. I’m from the Saint Petersburg office for Reidell.”

“Nice to meet you,” Victor says politely.

“And you as well. I hear your heel mount came loose?”

“Yes, the screw holes are warped and don’t hold it anymore.”

“Happens to the best of us, of course. Come on, let’s get you fitted.”

They head over to one of the back benches out of the way as more and more skaters arrive for training. Victor toes his shoes off and puts on his skating socks, and then Alexei produces a slick, shiny pair of black boots.

“Oh,” Victor says. “Those are black.”

“Well, yes.”

“I’ve only ever had white boots.”

“Did… you want white boots?” Alexei says hesitantly. He glances at his case, which is full of black boots and only black boots.

Victor looks too. He has had only white boots, ever since he was seven and his parents bought him his own instead of renting from the rink every time he arrived. He uses spandex to cover up the white leather during competition, but it never really occurred to him that he wouldn’t have to do that. Covered or not, the white leather always sticks out around the edges at the bottom with the lighter brown of the heels, and no matter how masculine his short program costume looked last season, no other men’s skater has brown heels and white boots.

“No, I want black ones, definitely.”

Alexei relaxes and his smile returns. “Alright, great. We have all the sizes from two centimeters less than the dimensions you gave us to two centimeters greater, so we can try boots on until you find a good fit for you. And if none of these work out, we have a heat-molded model, and you can come into the office to get fitted for those.”

Victor nods. Alexei hands him the boots and he takes them and pulls them on. He ties them tightly, then loosens the laces, then tightens them again. The boots feel just a little too tight, and Victor thinks that he doesn’t mind right now, but the idea of trying to do a quad toe loop with a pinch at the wrong time makes him anxious, so he shakes his head.

“Bigger? Smaller?”

“Bigger, a little bit,” Victor says. “But just a little bit.”

Alexei takes the boots back and looks at the numbers on the bottom of them, then paws through the case until he finds a bigger size. He hands those to Victor and Victor tries them on and stands up and rocks on the soles of his feet and frowns again.

“No good?”

“Just a little too loose, I think. Is there a middling size?”

Victor tries on three more pairs of boots before he finds two that wrap comfortably around his feet. The ankles are a little lower than he’s used to but, as he rotates his feet, he finds it gives him a little bit more flexibility than he had before. He paces up and down the benches, then jogs around a few times, then jumps and spins and lands and flexes his toes.

“These feel good,” he says.

“Yes?”

“Yeah. They sit well.” Victor rocks back on his heels. The heels on these skates are actually a little lower than the heels on his old ones and it’s throwing him off a little bit, but that’s not something that can be fixed. That’s just something that he’s going to have to get used to and he doesn’t really mind that much.

“Great. Wear these around for… oh, say, half an hour,” Alexei says. “Just to make sure. Then we can get you priced out.”

He packs up his cases and carries them outside back to his company van. Victor watches him leave, then goes back to jogging around the warm-up area. A couple of skaters call out to him and he waves back and flashes the heels of the boots at them with a grin.

After half an hour, the boots feel even more settled than before, so Victor digs his credit card out of his wallet in his duffel bag and signs off on his new pair of boots. Alexei gives him the address of the Saint Petersburg branch in case he needs to bring them back for any reason, and then he heads out. Victor carefully places his new boots into his duffel bag, then heads to the gym and lifts weights for about an hour and a half.

At home, he sets up an appointment with Paramount, and then two days later, he goes to their office with his boots and looks at blade models. His old blades were by a different manufacturer too, and a model that was catered to lighter, smaller skaters than he is now. Paramount has a new Gold Seal style and Victor holds them up to the light and loves them, even though they’re tremendously expensive.

He signs on those too and gives them his boots for mounting, and then the next day he comes back and picks them up. The technician who mounted the blades seems to have given everything a good shine too, because they gleam like something richer than leather. Victor picks one up and carefully pulls off the new blade guard and examines the blades from every angle. He’ll need to get them sharpened to his own R.O.H. at Yubileyny, but they’re so beautiful right now that he hardly wants to skate on them.

But he does. He brings them back to Yubileyny and has the staff equipment manager put on goggles and pick out a three quarter inch plate and then one slightly wider and they fix his edges for him. Victor waits outside, listening to the grind of diamonds against metal, shoes on the floor by his bag and blade guards in his hand. It’s been almost a week and he’s eager to get back on the ice and see how new it feels. New blades and new boots are always iffy, but these are newer than ever. These are relearning how to hold himself, half an inch lower to the ground like a streak of oil.

His boots are returned to him and he sits on the bench polishing them even though they already shine like silver. He clears away nonexistent particles of metal, and then he unlaces them and slides his feet into them. They feel familiar already, and comfortable when he laces them up and tugs at the loops and tucks them into the tongues so they don’t get loose.

He stands up and he’s pitched differently and he almost falls down. He snaps his blade guards on to practice walking but those are shaped differently too. He’s off center in just the right amount to look the same and feel completely different.

On the ice, he feels like an eight year old. It’s always just a little bit off, skating on newly sharpened blades, but Victor feels like he’s looking at everything from a different angle now. His toe picks are a little sharper and his blades are just a little bit longer and his heels are just a little bit shorter, but he looks like one long black slash of ink.

He skates around the barrier and tries some half jumps. His feet feel lighter than usual, and that’s odd too, but Yakov had said that Victor’s old Harlicks were like bricks and now that he has something else, Victor is inclined to agree. He stretches and warms up and then goes in for a triple toe loop and he over-rotates by accident because he doesn’t have to try quite so hard with these. He tries again and under-rotates, and keeps trying until he figures out the happy medium of holding back two split seconds after he used to push himself up into the air.

His toe picks leave divots in the ice that will have out be melted out during the break, but they lift him up more easily. He skates in big circles punctuated by jumps, and it feels weird for a while until it starts to feel more natural. Each time he stops, the starts are jarring, but they get less and less so until he can slide smoothly into a bit of choreography and the ice feels like it’s moving under him instead of the other way around. It's easier than it's ever been.

“New boots, Vitya?” one of Yakov’s new Senior women’s skaters asks when Victor finally exits the rink. With the loss of Ksenia, Yakov has been bringing in more skaters from outside of Saint Petersburg. This one has a heavy southern accent that clashes with Victor’s northern one, but she smiles a lot and she’s always kind.

“Yes. Just got them sharpened today.”

“Very nice. They suit you.”

She wanders off toward the women’s locker room, and Victor sits down on the bench to untie his laces. He just looks at the skates for a while, imagines how they’ll blend properly with this year’s costume, and smiles. They do suit him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if this doesn't make sense to someone who doesn't know things about skates, traditionally men's skates are black with black soles and women's skates are white with brown soles (somethings black soles, but brown seems to be more common). a fun "i didn't know i was trans" author fact is that when i used to skate, i would always ask for the men's skates.
> 
> picked victor's new skates from [this message board](http://www.goldenskate.com/forum/showthread.php?5491-WHO-makes-the-best-boots-and-blades-in-the-biz). realistically, he'd probably go for graf, but i didn't want to deal with the heat molding lmao
> 
> [these are the blades he bought](http://www.shop.kinziescloset.com/Paramount-440SS-Figure-Skate-Blade-Gold-Seal-Profile-Paramount440GoldSeal.htm). i don't think victor went for gold blades until he'd won enough things to be able to wear gold blades without looking like a giant asshole, so maybe when he's 21 or 22.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Victor convinces Chris to ditch a GPF banquet and go clubbing with him. (It's not very difficult.)
> 
> Takes place at the 2012 Grand Prix finals in Marseille. (see the timeline [here](https://www.docdroid.net/F3jXI0k/transvictortimeline.pdf.html))

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry about missing last week - everything was really crazy and bad and continues to be really crazy and bad, but i felt bad not posting anything for 2 weeks in a row. 
> 
> i'm a member of the "victor and chris had a lot of casual sex when they were younger" camp, but they don't have sex in this one.

Victor is bored.

He’s bored and he’s uncomfortable.

The ankle twist that he got during the free skate hasn’t gotten any better, even with the ice he ordered from room service, and wearing dress shoes isn’t helping him any. All of his muscles are tired and he doesn’t want to think about how he has to get back on the ice tomorrow for his exhibition skate. First through third are always expected to perform, but Victor just wants to lie in a bath of aspirin and sleep.

He laughs at something a sponsor says. The sponsor is six inches taller than him, a neatly groomed, greying man who has to look down at Victor to talk to him. Victor kind of wishes that he still wore heels to this sort of thing - he needs all the height advantages he can get. The sponsor says something else and Victor smiles brightly, shaking his bangs out of his face with a swooping motion of his head. A hand is held out to him and he shakes it, then looks over the sponsor’s shoulder to see Yakov watching him. Yakov nods in approval, then turns back to the older woman he’s talking to, some representative of the ISU. Victor keeps his smile plastered on until the sponsor leaves, then scoops up another flute of champagne. It is, as usual, very good, but it’s not good enough to hold his interest in the entire affair.

He’s here because he has to be. As a Grand Prix final winner, he’s expected to show up, make rounds, make conversation, pose for pictures. Victor really, really doesn’t want to do any of that, and especially not the last two. He’s extremely sought after, and usually that’s fine, but standing still in an expensive Italian wool suit and smiling so strangers will give him money to make him say things is difficult to stomach right now.

Victor edges to the outskirts of the party and watches for a while. He watches skaters dance around conversations like the banquet hall is made of ice, watches sponsors slip money into pockets just as gracefully. Yakov leaves about an hour in - he doesn’t feel the need to watch Victor like a babysitter anymore, and Victor has never caused an international scandal at an ISU event, so Victor doesn’t think he needs babysitting either. He nods at Victor to wish him a good night, and then disappears through the big double doors, which swing shut behind him with a soft thud. Victor sighs and rolls his shoulders - it’s been a couple years since his top surgery, but at events like these, it seems like he can still feel the press of his binder straps.

He makes polite conversation with ISU officials and coaches. Yes, he’s pleased with his performance. Yes, he thinks he could have done some jumps better. Yes, he’s looking forward to Nationals. No, he’s not worried about Europeans. He sees Christophe Giacometti across the crowd, probably being asked the same things. Chris has a good public face, but Victor knows that Chris is lying when a tall blade company representative asks him if he’s ready for Zagreb.

Victor’s skin itches. He wants to be out of this suit, away from this fancy, hemmed in crowd. He wants to strip his jacket off and roll up his sleeves and lean into someone’s shoulder and let his face do things that aren’t bland contentment.

He’s on Chris’s side of the room before he knows it, and he tucks his hand into the crook of Chris’s elbow. Chris looks up, startled, and Victor whispers, “Come with me.”

Chris looks him up and down - Victor bites back a frown - and nods, and he lets Victor steer him toward the big doors. Another skater asks where they’re going and Victor smiles cheerily and tells her they’re going to get some air. She looks at them knowingly, but turns away and doesn’t say a word.

Victor steers Chris until they make it outside and the door swings shut and closes behind them, and then he sighs heavily and leans against the wall. Chris straightens out his suit and tilts his head.

“Are you alright, Victor?”

“I’m really starting to dislike these,” Victor says.

“Why? There’s plenty of free champagne.”

“I never feel myself.” Victor runs a hand through his bangs. He wants to get out of the hotel. He wants to sleep but there’s a buzz at the base of his skull. “Let’s go out.”

“Is that why you’ve kidnapped me?”

“Please, they could find you if they wanted to.” Victor scrubs at his face, then looks up. Chris is closer than he remembered, and his hands are tucked neatly into his pockets. “Let’s go. Marseille has all sorts of things to do at night.”

“Trust me, I know all about French nightlife,” Chris says. He glances back at the door. There’s a murmur coming from behind it. No one ever raises their voice at these banquet events. “Don’t you have responsibilities as the gold medal winner? You should be in there showing off.”

“So should you, you won silver.” Victor hooks one finger in the knot of his tie and pulls it loose. “Come on. Let’s go out. No one will miss us, and I certainly won’t miss them.”

Chris bites his lip, but his eyes are sparkling, and his faux uncertainty gives way to a smile.

“Lead the way, monsieur.”

Victor hardly knows where he’s going, but he and Chris go down the stairs together, shoulders brushing, immaculate in their suits. People notice them and recognize them, but Victor is used to people whispering about him behind their hands, looking for the courage to ask for a signature or a photo. It doesn’t really bother him anymore, not like it used to when he couldn’t be sure what they were whispering.

Outside, Chris calls a cab and Victor strips off his jacket and tugs his tie looser. He’s instantly more comfortable - it’s like picking off a scab, leaving these things. He rolls up his sleeves, and then Chris raises a hand at him and he shuffles into the back of a cab and Chris hip checks him as he sits next to him and shuts the door.

“Where are you gentlemen headed?” the driver asks, in French.

“Dancing,” Victor says, also in French, but he can’t ever mask his accent.

“What sort of dancing?” the driver asks, in English this time.

Victor frowns.

“Le Trash,” Chris chimes in.

“Ah,” the driver murmurs to himself. “That kind of dancing.” He pulls away from the curb and Victor settles back into his half of the back seat to wonder if this might have been a bad idea. He looks at Chris, who is looking out the window. Chris seems relaxed, except for his shoulders, which are tense. He looks as immaculate as he had at the banquet; Victor no longer looks nearly as polished.

Chris turns his head and looks at Victor and Victor doesn’t look away in time so he doesn’t look away at all. They hold each other’s gaze for a moment, and it’s the slightest bit awkward. Victor likes Chris, he really really does - Chris is his favorite of the skaters he beats, the most fun to hang out with, with the best Twitter feed. He responds when Victor texts and they go out for drinks when their competition schedules overlap. He dances with Victor when they’re surrounded by other skaters, after the ISU judges have disappeared and the sponsors have emptied their pockets and galas get taken to hotel rooms with a quarter of the space and twice as much liquor. Victor knows what Chris’s mouth tastes like filled with champagne, and the morning after when it’s filled with hangover.

But Victor has a gold medal in a little box in his hotel room and Chris has a silver and, despite his best efforts, sometimes Chris has a hard time edging his way around that.

“Le Trash,” the driver announces a little while later. The club is in a thin alley, which would look sketchy if not for the dozen people hanging out in front of it. Most are men and many are in tight clothes. It’s not particularly difficult to imagine what any of them, Victor and Chris included, are doing there.

Victor doesn’t have enough Euros in his wallet, only rubles, so Chris pays for the cab and it drives away. Their names are called in a language Victor doesn’t quite recognize - Italian, perhaps - and then suddenly there are phones out and people trying to take pictures with them. They glance at each other and Chris smirks and Victor shrugs, so they spend five minutes taking pictures with buff drunk men. Victor signs a pectoral. He enjoys it immensely.

Victor pays their cover because he does have enough Euros for that, and then he can’t hear anything anymore so Chris nudges them to the bar. He orders Victor… something, Victor’s not sure what, but it’s sour and it tastes good and it goes down easily, and gets wine for himself, because Chris loves local flavor. Victor rolls his eyes and shouts as much, but Chris will never hear anything he says over the music and the talking and the point differential.

They drink and Victor sits on a stool and relishes the way people shove into him. Some do double takes, and Victor has to take a few more selfies, but there’s a vibrancy to a club like this than there never is and never will be at a skating event. No one here only knows how to talk about skating - some, if not most, of the people here don’t know anything about competitive skating at all. Victor looks around and meets some sets of eyes; he’s not planning on pursuing any of them, but sometimes to be looked at is nice.

In the few seconds he looked away, Chris has lost his jacket and half the closed buttons of his shirt, and suddenly looks much more a part of the crowd. He swirls his wine glass and inhales deeply, then drains it and sets it on the bar. He says something to Victor and Victor can’t hear it but he can see the words that form on Chris’s lips. _Danse avec moi._ Come dance with me.

Victor throws back the rest of his drink and nods, and Chris grins and takes him by the hand. They weave in between people, some of whom try to engage them, but Chris is single minded when he wants something and he carves out a little niche for him and Victor. Victor smiles in gratitude and Chris nods and drapes one arm over Victor’s shoulder and makes a little hip thrusting motion. Victor laughs and Chris brightens and does it again, then starts actually dancing along Victor’s side, like he’s not five inches taller than Victor is. Victor appreciates it anyway, and when Chris leans into him, he leans back, because Chris is built solidly and he feels nice to lean on.

It feels good, to be here. There are a lot of boys, and a lot of them are not wearing a whole lot of clothes, and some of them are entranced by Victor and let him be entranced by them. He’s still a little bit soft looking, and he won’t ever not be - testosterone can only take him so far - but he’s not worried. Every man who approaches him is incredibly gay, and that’s very satisfying.

Victor passes over all of them. Chris makes out with someone for a while, and then seems to get bored and goes back to dancing. He dances on his own for a while, and then he drapes himself all over Victor and makes grinding against him feel silly and fun and not loaded with intent. Victor laughs again and runs his hands over Chris’s arms and his chest. A few jealous looks are thrown his way, though he doesn’t know who the crowd is more jealous of.

He gets propositioned a lot as the night goes on. He unbuttons a few buttons of his shirt because it’s hot and he doesn’t have a binder to hide anymore, and it’s just the right amount of rumpled and undone for people to come flocking in. Victor is extremely pleased about it, even though he doesn’t give anyone more than a dance - if anyone looks insistent, Chris turns around and drapes himself over Victor’s back and nuzzles his throat, and that delivers the message pretty quickly. Victor takes Chris’s hand and squeezes, and Chris goes back to kissing some boy who likes mesh too much.

The club closes at two, but Victor gets tired before that. More people are drinking, and more people are pairing off, and Victor doesn’t really feel like sleeping with a stranger tonight. People disappear upstairs with startling regularity, and the crowd thins enough that Victor is only mostly packed in instead of crushed on all sides. Chris has slipped a few people away, doing something with someone that Victor can’t see. Victor is abruptly over the whole thing.

He digs his phone out of his pocket and checks it. No text from Yakov, no call, just a few notifications that he doesn’t have to or want to deal with right now. If anyone noticed he left, they didn’t care enough to pursue it, so he’s free and clear to get back whenever he wants, and he wants to get back now.

He shuffles and weaves his way over to Chris, who is dancing, in the loosest sense of the word, with a shirtless man who’s even taller than him. But when he lays a hand on Chris’s arm, Chris looks down and their eyes meet, and Chris nods and taps the other man’s shoulder and says something into his ear. The man looks disappointed, but he and Chris kiss each other on the cheek and he edges away, and Chris turns to Victor and leans in close.

“You want to go?” Chris has to yell, but Victor actually hears him for the first time, thanks to the thinning crowd.

“Take me back to the hotel,” he replies. “We can go to your room.”

Chris’s eyes flash a little, and he smirks. “As you wish, mon cher.”

Chris is bigger, so he bulldozes them out the way he bulldozed them in. Victor holds onto the back of his shirt and sidesteps people who are too drunk to get out of the way on their own. They burst out the door into cold, fresh air, and Victor sucks in a breath greedily as Chris tightens up his tie and pulls his jacket back on.

They get another cab back to the hotel and Chris pays again. The driver gives them both a knowing look - he must recognize them, but Victor doesn’t care. Neither he nor Chris make much of a secret of their preferences, and they’re both sober and alone with each other - the tabloids can say they’re fucking and the tabloids aren’t always wrong, but it’s far from the worst thing said about either of them. Victor leans his head against Chris’s shoulder and closes his eyes - he’s tired and sweaty and he wants a shower and he wants some sleep and he wants a warm body to curl up against for the night, and Chris smells familiar, like the ice after it’s been freshly melted smooth.

Chris takes his hand when they get back to the hotel and leads him past Victor’s floor up to Chris’s. He starts undressing the second they get inside, and Victor heads right for the shower. He leaves his suit in a pile on the toilet and quickly rinses himself off. There are fancy soaps and body washes lining the edge of the shower, but Victor gropes blindly around the sink until he finds the standard issue hotel soap and scrubs himself down. He washes his hair with bar soap, which is unpleasant, but he feels better afterwards, when he climbs out of the shower and towels himself off with Chris’s one dry towel and then wraps the towel around his waist and goes back out into the bedroom.

Chris is lying on top of the covers in only his underwear, glasses on, typing on his laptop. He glances up and smiles at Victor, then goes back to replying to emails. Victor drops the towel on the ground, less concerned about nudity than he would be with pretty much anyone else, and walks over to the bed and crawls under the covers. He lies on his side, the blankets pulled up over his shoulder, as he watches Chris typing in German. He doesn’t know German but he can make out words and acronyms - the ISU, Switzerland, Zagreb where Europeans will be held. He wonders who Chris is talking to.

Chris finishes a few emails, then sets his laptop aside. He shuffles down and lies on the bed facing Victor, though on top of the covers. “Comfortable?”

“Yes,” Victor says. He reaches out and plucks Chris’s round glasses off his face. “These make you look so old.”

“I’m only twenty-two,” Chris says, affronted, but he folds the glasses up and puts them on the bedside behind him. He rests his hand on Victor’s shoulder, then lets it slide down Victor’s side to his hip. “What do you want?”

“Sleep,” Victor says honestly. He lifts the cover up a little in invitation.

“Anything but sleep?”

“Nothing else.”

Chris nods. He rolls off the bed, then slides under the sheets with Victor. Victor rolls onto his other side and scoots backwards until he runs into Chris, and a strong arm wraps around his waist. He sighs softly and closes his eyes - it feels so nice, like it always does. Chris is scratchy against his back as he leans his chin against Victor’s shoulder.

“Well done,” he murmurs against the back of Victor’s neck. “Three Grand Prix finals in a row.”

“Mm,” Victor hums, and he knows why he’s not going to have sex with Chris tonight. He likes Chris, he does, and Chris likes him - they make a good pair, of friends and troublemakers and podium sharers - but they’re not the same. Victor is a step up, always, always better, with higher scores and cleaner jumps and resentment thrown at him. There’s something in Chris’s tone that Victor can’t overlook - it’s not always there, not even most of the time, but it’s there right now. Chris is jealous, and tired, and upset, somewhere inside of himself, and it’s Victor’s fault, and Victor has no remorse.

_Are you dating Christophe Giacometti? a reporter asked Victor._

_Victor smirked and laughed. “No, certainly not. Chris and I are just good friends.”_

_“Never say never,” Chris has said later, reading the article, and winked. Victor laughed at that too, and they knew that never was, if not said, then understood._

“You think so loud, darling,” Chris murmurs in Victor’s ear. “Go to sleep.”

Victor hums. He nestles back again. Chris squeezes him. He’s too good for Victor, really. Victor has beaten Chris in every possible competition, in every possible way, and Chris still lets Victor curl up in his bed and holds him because he knows that Victor needs it and has nothing and nowhere else.

In the morning, they’ll have coffee together, and maybe crépes. Yakov will yell at Victor for not sleeping in his own room, Victor will be flippant. People will make assumptions and they’re right half the time anyway so Victor won’t care, and neither will Chris. They’ll post pictures together on Instagram because it’s fun to fuel the fire, and then they’ll slip apart and crash together again in Croatia in a month and Victor will beat Chris again and Chris will act like it doesn’t hurt.

Victor stays awake for a while after Chris falls asleep. He thinks about Chris’s resentment, which is quiet and guilty and well hidden. Chris never lets it impact their friendship, but they both know it’s there. Victor doesn’t want to give it the chance to grow into something more. He’ll take this, Chris curled around him and snoring softly because Victor needs the touch and he trusts Chris and Chris knows that Victor knows what’s inside him and they don’t have to talk about it.

Victor stays awake for a long time.


End file.
